People tend to lose their heads when an elite player changes teams. In a good way. For fans of the team that acquires the star, it's a time to dream. A time to anticipate the thrills that you think lie ahead. For fans of the game in general, it's always interesting to muse about the effect a star will have in a new context, especially when he joins an already strong club. For fans of the team losing the star ... well, let's keep the tone upbeat today.
The term "blockbuster" is thrown about a little too easily about baseball trades because the effect of a single transaction is almost never league-altering. There are simply too many discrete elements that go into winning and losing.
Sometimes, though, a baseball trade carries with it ramifications that echo for decades. The move of Babe Ruth from the Red Sox to the Yankees is the most famous example. Another one was probably Reggie Jackson moving from the Orioles to the Yankees, if only for making that era's Bombers a more unforgettable team. Frank Robinson going from the Reds to the Orioles might qualify. You get the idea. Such extreme-magnitude transactions are rare.
Given the risk-averse way in which most MLB teams operate in the current era, the deal that moves Mookie Betts from the Boston Red Sox to the Los Angeles Dodgers certainly qualifies as a blockbuster in the purest sense. Players this good, this young, simply don't change teams very often.
Here's a little proof of that:
Just the other day, I put out my updated "best-in-game" ranking by asking the only question about it that you really can at this point: How long will Mike Trout be baseball's best player? In that piece, I listed my new top 10:
Mike Trout (171.2 five-year win shares)
Alex Bregman (168.8)
Christian Yelich (156.3)
Mookie Betts (150.9)
Cody Bellinger (144.8)
Anthony Rendon (137.7)
Francisco Lindor (130.9)
Nolan Arenado (127.8)
Freddie Freeman (126.8)
Marcus Semien (122.3)
Betts is probably the consensus second-best player among analysts right now, though I haven't conducted a poll. He slipped from second in 2019 to fourth in my system this year because Bregman and Yelich put up better seasons. Right now, as good as Betts has been, his historic 2018 season looks like a bit of an outlier. He can fix that perception with a monster season in 2020 for the Dodgers in what is a platform season for him ... he can become a free agent after the campaign is finished.
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Betts has six big league seasons under his belt. Well, 5⅓, really, because he didn't reach the majors for good until August 2014. Here's a combination that's exceedingly rare: a player has completed fewer than seven big league seasons, ranks among the top 10 players in baseball (by my method) and will join a new team in the season to come. Following is a brief history.
During the reserve clause era, or before the mid-1970s:
1919: Babe Ruth (No. 1 player in baseball) went from the Red Sox to the Yankees
1941: Johnny Mize (No. 4, from Cardinals to Giants)
1959: Rocky Colavito (No. 5, from Indians to Tigers)
After Colavito, there was a quarter century before it happened again:
1984: Rickey Henderson (No. 4, from Athletics to the Yankees)
1990: Fred McGriff (No. 5, from Blue Jays to the Padres)
1994: Marquis Grissom (No. 10, from Expos to the Braves)
2007: Miguel Cabrera (No. 6, from Marlins to the Tigers)
2008: Matt Holliday (No. 10, from Rockies to the Athletics)
2014: Josh Donaldson (No. 7, from Athletics to the Blue Jays)
2017: Christian Yelich (No. 5, from Marlins to the Brewers)
2019: Mookie Betts (No. 4, from Red Sox to the Dodgers)
And that's it. That's the history of top-10 players with less than seven years in the majors who ended the season with one team and started the next with another. (And a couple of these players, Donaldson and Yelich, weren't considered top-10ers at the time they moved, as their ratings are a quirk of my method that uses the center of a rolling five-year period to measure a player at any given point in time.)
We often hype things out of proportion to what they actually mean, but in this case, it's hard to overstate what a seismic event the Betts-to-the-Dodgers megadeal really is. Players as good and young as Betts just don't change teams very often. Part of that is because players as good as Betts don't come around very often in the first place.
Of course, Betts didn't just move to any new team. He went to the Dodgers. For all the attention the Dodgers seem to get for not winning a title since 1988, they've unarguably been baseball's strongest and most consistent franchise for a period that now stretches to the past seven years. To wit:
Seven straight division titles
Seven straight seasons with at least 91 wins
671 wins (33 more than any other team)
5,219 runs (10th overall; third most in the National League)
4,235 runs allowed (259 fewer than any other team)
It's hard to improve a team that good. Acquiring Mookie Betts is one way to go about it.
Another set of rankings we did recently was to rate each team's everyday lineup, insofar as teams even have everyday lineups anymore. It's a rating of each team's most frequently used base lineup, using projections. In the initial rankings, the Dodgers came in second, finishing one run per 600 plate appearances behind the top-ranked Houston Astros. The new top 10:
Los Angeles Dodgers (97.2; Previous: 2)
Houston Astros (96.5; Previous: 1)
New York Mets (93.8; Previous: 3)
Los Angeles Angels (90.3; Previous: 4)
Chicago Cubs (90.1; Previous: 5)
Oakland Athletics (89.1; Previous: 6)
Atlanta Braves (88.7; Previous: 7)
New York Yankees (87.7; Previous: 9)
San Diego Padres (87.3; Previous: 10)
Washington Nationals (86.9; Previous: 11)
That's a bottom-up way to look at it, but let's consider the ways in which Betts makes the Dodgers better. In the initial, pre-Betts rankings, the Dodgers' base lineup projected to lead the majors in on-base percentage, slugging percentage, OPS, isolated power, secondary average and walk rate. You can't improve on No. 1, but Betts does bolster their top ranking in each of these categories.
Where he really boosts the Dodgers is in three other areas:
Strikeout percentage: 7th pre-Betts to 6th
Batting average: 10th to 7th
Speed rating: 26th to 17th
Betts makes the Dodgers a little more contact friendly and a little more likely to cash in once he's on the basepaths. A mild criticism of the Dodgers has been that while they execute organizational strategies very well, their collective approach has led to too many hitters with overlapping skill sets. The theory is this leads to inconsistencies, too many games in which everyone is passing the baton and no one is ever sprinting across the finish line.
There is probably only a small amount of truth in that critique. The Dodgers have ranked sixth overall in run scoring over the past three years and second in the NL, just three runs behind the Nationals. However, the Dodgers have had 70 games during that span in which they've scored zero runs or one run. While there have been only five teams to score more often than L.A. overall, eight have had fewer famine games.
So, yeah, there is an element of truth to the inconsistency critique, but it's not like this was a huge problem for the Dodgers. That's the thing ... the Dodgers didn't really have any huge problems. But if you want to iron out some of those nothing-type of offensive performances, you'll want someone who puts the ball in play and gets a lot of hits. Betts' .319 average over the past two seasons is the third best in the majors, behind Yelich and Jeff McNeil.
You also want someone who can get extra bases with his legs, to turn those on-base opportunities into actual runs on the scoreboard. Over the past two seasons, Betts leads the majors with 12.4 baserunning runs above average, per Baseball Reference. The Dodgers didn't have any true weak spots on their offensive dossier, they just had a couple of areas that weren't as elite as the others. So they went out and got a player who is as good as anyone in baseball at those things.
In that vein, the Dodgers have done the near impossible. They've made a great offense better, more balanced and more complete. They don't just lack holes in the skill categories, they also have absolutely no weak positions on the field. According to the FanGraphs' depth charts, here are the Dodgers' MLB ranks in fWAR by position:
C: 10th
1B: 6th
2B: 9th
SS: 4th
3B: 10th
LF: 4th
CF: 2nd
RF: 1st
DH: 12th
That, folks, is a team without a hole. I left the DH ranking in there just for fun. With a No. 12 ranking at DH, that means that the National League's Dodgers have a better projection for that position than several AL teams. That's depth.
And, yet, none of this guarantees the Dodgers anything. They won 106 games last season. They can be a better team and still not win that many games again. They enter the season as an overwhelming favorite to win the NL West for a staggering eighth straight time, but who knows? Maybe the starting pitching suddenly turns into a gaping wound. There are no sure things in baseball, other than when you think you've spotted one, you can be sure that you haven't.
I think back to when the White Sox signed Albert Belle away from the Indians and made him baseball's highest-paid player. The season before, 1996, the White Sox had finished 14½ games behind Cleveland in the division and three games behind Baltimore for the wild-card slot with an 85-77 record. Chicago ranked third in the AL with a 108 OPS+ but also had the league's second-oldest lineup. That lineup was anchored by the great Frank Thomas, who was coming off two monster seasons (as was Belle), but had led the league in intentional walks two seasons running.
After Belle signed, Thomas told Baseball Digest, "We have the best lineup in baseball now." White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf was even more effusive, citing all of Thomas' intentional walks and saying, "Frank could hit 65 homers this year and Belle could drive in 200 runs."
As it turned out, the White Sox went 80-81 in 1997, with an OPS+ (101) that barely cleared league average. But Thomas' intentional walk total did drop by two-thirds.
That's just the way it goes in baseball sometimes. Adding Betts to the Dodgers gives L.A. baseball's best lineup, right now, on paper. Whether that rating holds up at season's end, we'll have to see. Nevertheless, as I wrote last week, if you can get Mookie Betts, there is no reason not to do it.
There is also no reason not to lose our heads by imagining what Betts might do in Dodger blue. After all, spring training is just getting started. This is the time of the year for big dreams. Right now, no one can dream bigger than the Dodgers.